There’s a certain point in the process of what, for the lack of a better word, I’ll call “filmmaking” (even though that sounds much too pretentious for the stream of hastily written jokes we shot with a $500 HD camera) where the story becomes meaningless and the act of completing the work becomes an essentially technical endeavor, with any creative decisions along the way based on your memories of the past. When you add it all up, I have probably watched this episode of Condominance, this thing that I am working on, maybe two, three hundred times. I’ve been color correcting and sound mixing for the past week, and for each process it takes around six hours of work to finish ten minutes of footage, manually going shot by shot (there are around 400 shots, give or take). I watch the whole thing over and over again and the jokes are no longer funny, I’m not particularly moved in any way. I show it to others and they enjoy it, but to me it feels like a dead object. All I have to rely on as an indication of quality is the script I wrote and loved back in July and the laughter I hear during takes while I’m editing.

It seems to me that this kind of disengagement from the creative process in the midst of a work’s completion is perhaps something unique to only a few mediums: filmmaking has it, and from what I’ve heard, serious cartooning probably has it as well: wasting your life away on a drafting table, pencilling then inking then coloring away until the lines you drew no longer have any meaning. An author’s tenth revision of their novel might feel this way too, if it’s demanded by the publisher and the author’s heart is no longer in it. Regardless, I’m here with my HSL sliders and 400 shots to get through. I hope you will enjoy it when I put it online, and I also hope that I will someday come back to it, years later, watch it, and be able to enjoy the product of my younger self again.